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Cohort Differences in Parental Financial Help to Adult Children

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Demography

Abstract

In this article, we examine birth cohort differences in parents’ provision of monetary help to adult children with particular focus on the extent to which cohort differences in family structure and the transition to adulthood influence these changes. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study from 1994 to 2010, we compare financial help to children of three respondent cohorts as the parents in these birth cohorts from ages 53–58 to 57–62. We find that transfers to children have increased among more recent cohorts. Two trends—declining family size and children’s delay in marriage—account for part of the increase across cohorts. However, other trends, such as the increase in the number of stepchildren and increasing child’s income level, tend to decrease the observed cohort trend.

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Notes

  1. Full documentation and data download is available from the HRS website (http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/).

  2. These models are available in STATA using the tobit2 or logit2 command in tobit2.ado or logit2.ado, respectively. See Petersen (n.d.).

  3. We also used means of categorical variables. Although it makes no sense to talk of an individual being a 0.35 college graduate, at the population level, we can think of the predicted probability of providing help in a population composed of 35 % college graduates. We estimated the decomposition for someone with positive assets (approximately 94 % of the households have positive assets).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging grants to authors John Henretta (R01 AG 024051) and Beth Soldo (R01 AG024046).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    John C. Henretta

  2. Consumers Union, Yonkers, NY, USA

    Matthew F. Van Voorhis

  3. Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Matthew F. Van Voorhis

  4. Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Beth J. Soldo

Authors
  1. John C. Henretta
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  2. Matthew F. Van Voorhis
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  3. Beth J. Soldo
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Correspondence to John C. Henretta.

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Henretta, J.C., Van Voorhis, M.F. & Soldo, B.J. Cohort Differences in Parental Financial Help to Adult Children. Demography 55, 1567–1582 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0687-2

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